Thursday, March 20, 2008

Yes, but what did the IRAQIS think of the invasion?

In the period up to the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq the media have gone into overdrive to cover every angle of how wrong it all was. There have been Anniversary Specials in the magazines and broadsheets, daily reports from Baghdad, Ten Days to War (or should that be Ten Days of Anti-war Propaganda?) on Newsnight, a similar countdown to war on the Today programme, Iraq -The Betrayal and Battle for Haditha on Channel 4, The Iraq War by Numbers on ITV - the common theme being that the war was a total disaster. Everyone has had their say, the columnists, the presenters, the pundits, the politicians, and even individual Iraqis, singled out to fit in with the standpoint of the interviewer.

What had been missing from the many views expressed was some sort of reasonably reliable survey of how the Iraqis as awhole felt about the invasion five years on. After all it was they who were at the cutting edge of the operation. Last Monday BBC News remedied this deficiency by announcing the results of a poll of Iraqi opinion it had conducted in February along with ABC News and other broadcasters. Suprisingly 55% of those questioned said that their lives were good, compared with 39% in a poll taken in August 2007. 63% believed the Americans should leave only after a period during which security and government get stronger and far from Iraq being on the verge of civil war, 66% supported a united Iraq. Unsuprisingly large majorities considered that there was still much to be done to improve security and the public services.

But tucked away at the foot of the BBC's website report was the most significant finding of all - one that was directly relevant to the media's pre-anniverary Iraq fest referred to above. That finding provided the answer to the crucial question of whether the Iraqis themselves thought that the invasion was right or wrong. Given nationalistic feelings and the terrible suffering that the Iraqis had endured one would have expected very few to say that the invasion was right - 10% to 20% at most. In fact the figure was an impressive 49%. Of those who said the invasion was wrong, the great majority were Sunnis, the minority ethnic group that had been in the ascendancy under Saddam. The full ethnic breakdown of answers to this question was 95% of Sunnis saying the invasion was wrong, 65% of the majority Shia group saying it was right, as did 87% of the Kurds (click on to "The Iraq Survey: Key Results in Graphics" for the full details of the poll).

All in all the survey rather pulled the rug from under all that media coverage lambasting the invasion and its aftermath. So perhaps we can understand why it has received so little publicity. Even the dear old BBC which had commissioned the poll and is mandated to be impartial relegated it to about half-way down its television Six O' Clock News and to bottom of the Ten O' Clock News. Needless to say it was presented as a mix of positive and negative news, glimmers of opimism etc with, scandalously, NO MENTION AT ALL of the key finding about Iraqi attitudes to the invasion.

Am I being too cynical in concluding that the BBC ran the story this way because it tended to undermine the negative spin they were putting on the invasion in their other programmes? I think not, bearing in mind that two months after my complaint to them about their negative coverage of the best crime figures we have had for years (click here for my blog on the matter) I am still waiting for an explanation (despite reminders). The normal waiting period is ten days.

Both stories illustrate how even what is supposed to be the most non-partisan part of the media can set their agenda against this New Labour government. Until we start taking this media bias more seriously I fear there is little prospect of reversing the swings against us, particularly in bad times.

Comments

So right, Stan.

I'm usually a supporter of the good ol' Beeb - because it's nowhere near as one-sided as our paper press, due to its regulatory position re even-handedness (?), but I hadn't spotted this BBC non-mention of Iraqi contentment.

Terrific reference! Thanks! This stuff looks like potential dynamite in the run up to the US November election.

The summary might be:
- the invasion was more or less OK.
- the continuing occupation was and still is an awful mess, with no obvious way out.
- the position is better than in 2006/7 but much worse than in 2004/5.
- where progress is made, the people on the scene judge that most of the credit should go to Iraquis.

A perceptive Palestinian living in Iraq said just after the invasion that these people would give the Americans six months and then start shooting. They gave the Americans a year, which was wasted. Thereafter things went to hell in a handbasket - to use a phrase G.W. Bush might understand.

I didn't agree with the Iraq war and I have welcome the US/UK decision to begin withdrawal but I am extremely worried about the future of the 4,000 Iranians who fled the mullahs' regime in the late 1980s and set up a camp (Camp Ashraf) north-east of Baghdad. During the US occupation, they were under direct American security but responsibility for their well-being has now been handed over to the Iraqi government. Quite right you may feel...except that the Iraqi government is under increasing pressure from the Iranian regime to hand over the 4,000 to their "justice" system. Since this will almost certainly mean their torture and execution ( more than 100,000 have been executed by the mullahs) lots of people in this country have been trying to get the Iraqis to acknowledge their responsibility to protect them as refugees. Among their supporters have been Amnesty International and the European Parliament.
Worryingly, the Iraqi government, which contains pro-Islamic and pro-Iranian elements, has now mounted an effective blockade of the camp, refusing to allow food and medical supplies, stopping doctors from entering and banning journalists, human rights organisations and humanitarian agencies from visiting the camp.
Now Iraqi government spokesmen are threatening to close the camp completely and hand over its residents to Iran. They are likely to do this before elections in June, when it is expected that pro-Iran groups will lose support to more secular and moderate forces.
Supporters of the camp are fighting a desperate legal rearguard action to stop this happening. But they need money, not just for campaigning but to ensure the camp's residents get legal backing to fight any attempts to deport them.
We on the left are telling the US and UK government to engage with Iran rather than threatening it with war - but engagement also means supporting the forces of democracy and opposition in that country. Camp Ashraf is a beacon of hope and active political support for the pro-democracy groups inside Iran. We should put our money where our mouths are and help them.
I would urge Progress supporters to send donations to Iran Liberty Association, Trafalgar House, Grenville Place
London NW7 3SA. Their telephone number is 020 8906 7739 and their e-mail is info@iranliberty.org.uk